So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life (38 page)

The silence was broken by Marlene Eagleburger, who exclaimed, quite audibly, “Now you’ve bought the farm.” The Europeans’ comfort with English didn’t extend to this particular (and of somewhat ancient origin) bit of American slang, and the U.S.commissioners were probably too young to have known its origins. In any event, the Europeans crowded about, asking what she had meant. “Was there really a farm, and if so, where was it?” “Was it his farm, or a government farm, and to whom was it sold?” Some—the Germans and the Swiss—wondered if the selling price for the farm would be apportioned among the companies, and if so by what formula? None of them had heard of any rule by which a chairman could “sell” a property to committee members, just out of pique. Mrs. Eagleburger had gone to accompany her aggrieved husband, leaving only me to explain “buying the farm.”

It had its origins during World War I. The nascent U.S. Army Air Corps, which after World War II became today’s U.S. Air Force, was having difficulty recruiting fliers. It was then announced, in a bid to counter the fear which restrained volunteers, that if any pilot crashed and was killed, the government would pay off the mortgage on his farm and give it, free and clear, to his widow. Hence, when pilots spoke of a buddy who had been shot down in a dogfight with German planes, it would be said he’d “bought the farm.” In other words, to translate for Marlene Eagleburger, the European companies had brought great trouble on themselves.

Soothing words were spoken, Eagleburger was persuaded to return to the podium, and Madame Eagleburger was persuaded by me to explain, if asked, that “the farm had been redeemed.”

*   *   *

My final public relations story: I was approached by an old RFK associate. He was married to a distinguished art historian and chief curator at the Corcoran Gallery, who had just come under fire for her curatorship of the Robert Mapplethorpe photography show, in defense of whom I had played a role, and who had recommended me to her husband, who was a member of the board of directors of the United Way of America (UWA). Some press inquiries, including from
The Washington Post
and an investigative magazine with a good reputation, spurred on by anonymous tips from United Way staffers, had raised board questions about William Aramony, the widely respected executive director of United Way, alleging he had used United Way funds to support a mistress. The board, a classic collection of leading corporate CEOs, wanted the matter “looked into” and the press rumors put to rest—assuming them to be untrue.

I decided to begin, logically enough, with Aramony himself. He greeted me, to my surprise, with a hearty, “Hi, I’m Bill Aramony—I’m what is commonly called a womanizer.” An otherwise engaging fellow, he strongly denied the charges about using United Way funds for his private enterprises but also freely admitted that, indeed, he was personally paying the expenses of a mistress. As our conversation went on, there seemed to be more than one mistress, all, he assured me, with the explicit agreement of his wife, from whom he was separated. We talked at some length about United Way and his successes there, including a splendid fund-raising partnership with the National Football League, which provided United Way with supporting commercials during NFL game telecasts, featuring star players and at no cost to United Way.

Aramony also ranged over a number of other UWA activities and what he called “spin-offs,” related subsidiaries he had created that performed tasks I thought were almost all performed by other nonprofits themselves—paying rent on apartments for visiting dignitaries, buying supplies, and so forth. Somehow, I found Aramony a bit too glib, especially his assertions about “expensing” activities of the UWA to one or more of these “spin-offs.” I thought the services of a trained and trusted private investigator would be needed. So I turned to a friend and highly ranked investigator, Terry Lenzner, who had served on the staff of the Senate Watergate Committee and then formed a detective agency.

By now, I was beginning to hear additional charges against Aramony from inside the organization. A well-placed vice president had begun to put together bits and pieces of information leading her to believe that the presence of Aramony’s old friends as the well-paid CEOs of the “spin-offs,” in addition to his frequent trips to Florida and the existence there of two UWA-funded condos and his regular first-class travel arrangements, merited at least systematic investigation. All these, and a broad mandate to seek information wherever he wished, I turned over to Lenzner.

Terry quickly found discrepancies in Aramony’s accounts of his activities, among them that he was the record owner of a condo for which one of UWA’s spin-offs had paid and where his girlfriend had lived for a while. There was more, including trips Aramony had taken for no discernible business purpose and private equipment bought on UWA credit cards—all of which was adding up to maybe $100,000 annually or more.

In possession of the information Terry Lenzner had dug up—and with more to come—but with the board still willing to do no more than think of all this as “minor infractions,” and seemingly unaware of the grave danger of leaks to the press, and with strong rumors I was beginning to hear about the interest of a federal grand jury, I thought it best to advise the board to hire a law firm to collect the data and advise UWA of possible dangers. UWA hired a good law firm, and it was not as relaxed about Aramony’s doings as the board had become. Eventually, the law firm concurred with me in recommending Aramony be dismissed by UWA. He eventually served time in federal prison.

The self-styled womanizer himself, before his prison term, confessed to me he had seriously “overreached” financially and said he thought returning from UWA board meetings in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles on the same airplane with his board members, and their enjoying first-class seating and service while he was on his way to economy class, might have made him steal money. At an annual salary that, with perks, approached $500,000, and a $1 million pension plan, I would have thought he might have resisted the impulse.

*   *   *

A “coming together” of sorts for me started to occur at an unlikely time—while conducting public relations work on behalf of a movie about the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

More than half of the American people believed then, and still do, that the assassination of JFK was a conspiracy—many more people than think an assassin acted alone. It is by far the single most talked-about mystery in my lifetime and probably in all of U.S. history. Generation after generation refuses to believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. We’re not arguing that way about who killed Lincoln. There are no conspiracy theories that Robert E. Lee, Andrew Johnson, or a murky cabal in the Deep South was behind it. The JFK assassination may go down as the great unsolved American mystery. Think about our history books, where there are no other unsolved mysteries. And if the JFK assassination is not solved soon, it probably won’t ever be. Just about everyone who was involved has died or is close to dying. If the truth—assuming it exists—doesn’t come out soon, we’ll never know.

I was in Peru when the president was killed, but we had no access to instant information. That day, I was in Arequipa, Peru’s second city, visiting a group of volunteers. I was walking downtown, near the Peace Corps office, when I observed a crowd on the sidewalk, talking agitatedly, and one man who was crying. I hastened to his side. “What is the matter?” I asked. “The president’s been shot and killed,” he exclaimed.” “President Belaúnde?” I asked, referring to the president of Peru. He replied, still in tears, “I wish it were!”

I returned quickly to the States and found the questioning well under way. It made sense to me. Oswald’s easy return from Russia. The supposed, but flimsy, Cuban connection. Ruby doing a Mob-style hit on Oswald.

No non-conspirator would have known more about the assassination of JFK than did Robert F. Kennedy. He presumably knew most, if not all, of his brother’s major secrets; he was attorney general of the United States at the time of the Dallas shooting and likely would have had access to the FBI and other investigative agencies. And perhaps more important, in the days, months, and years after his brother’s assassination, he was a very public and highly accessible lightning rod to whom anyone could have sent information.

Bob did not talk much about what he always referred to as “the president’s assassination.” One month, we were walking through New York’s LaGuardia Airport, and the photograph of the New Orleans district attorney, Jim Garrison, was all over the newspaper stands. Garrison was claiming that he had proof that a conspiracy of Mob and CIA people, working in unison, had killed JFK. RFK gestured toward a picture of Garrison and asked me, “Does that guy have anything?” to which I replied, “I’m not sure
he
has anything, but I think there
is
something.” He then said, “Read everything you can and become an expert in case I need to know all about it. Find out what’s happening.”

I’d already been interested more than mildly in the various conspiracy theories about the JFK killing, but now I got serious. I think I bought and read every major and a few minor books on the subject, looked into prior histories and records, and decided early—a view I retain—that the assassination—the shooting—was the work of a hired high school dropout named Lee Harvey Oswald, perhaps aided by some other gunmen, who was engaged and run by a person or persons unknown from any or all of three groups: anti-Castro Cuban exiles, “rogue” CIA or ex–CIA agents, and leaders of organized crime. Certainly all three had good—indeed, overpowering—motives: The Cuban refugees feared, correctly, that a second JFK term would certainly see a relaxation of hostilities with Cuba and perhaps restoration of ordinary noncriminal commerce and diplomacy; a wing of the CIA, some of whom despised JFK and reveled in conflict, preferably armed; and organized crime had the best motive, a restoration of its position as one of the leading owners of the Cuban economy through its pre-Castro domination of tourism, prostitution, and gambling.

So I plunged into the task. A man named Raymond Marcus, an early opponent of the Warren Commission, came to our house in Bethesda and arranged five-foot-high blowups of photographs of the grassy knoll, and, sure enough, there was a rifle (or a small branch) aimed at the motorcade from the brush. The more I read and gleaned from interviews, the more I became convinced the single-bullet and the single-gunman theories were simply impossible, not just unlikely. I sought answers: How and why could this high school dropout from Texas, in his application for a passport, list as his travel objective to study at the Albert Schweitzer College in Switzerland? Why, when Oswald returned to the United States from his stay in the Soviet Union, was he met in Dallas by George de Mohrenschildt, almost certainly a long-term CIA agent or asset? Why did Oswald describe himself when arrested as “a patsy”? Why did Oswald pose, often and openly, as a member of a virtually nonexistent pro-Castro front, one created and maintained at the address of a CIA agent? Why did a Cuban-American woman, Silvia Odio, testify she was once introduced, in Dallas, to Lee Harvey Oswald as “Mr. Oswald, from the CIA”? Why did some man standing at the side of the JFK motorcade, as the car passed him, raise and lower his umbrella—and in broad daylight? What was the involvement of the Mob chieftain Carlos Marcello, and what were his connections to the mafiosi John Rosselli, who was murdered just before he was scheduled to testify in front of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about his involvement in a plot to kill Castro? What prompted Governor John Connally to say, immediately after both he and JFK had been shot, “
They’ve
killed the president”? Why was Jack Ruby, a small-time hoodlum with clear organized crime connections, allowed into the Dallas Police Station, armed, at exactly the same moment the perpetrator of the crime of the century was being moved? How could the famous “single bullet” have performed so many changes of course and erratic deviations and even a one-second pause in its flight through the bodies and limbs of President Kennedy and Governor Connally? Why did Lee Harvey Oswald deny the crime, when every prior assassin had proudly proclaimed his guilt and his motive?

The questions seemed endless. I thought I’d be prepared, once RFK had been elected president, to make my findings available to him, especially after he answered a laconic yes to a student’s question at an open meeting at San Fernando Valley State College at Northridge, a few days prior to the California primary, “If you are elected, will you reopen the file on who killed President Kennedy?”

Thus, in 1992, I became a supporter and defender of Oliver Stone’s movie
JFK,
not because I thought it was without major flaws, or came closest to the truth, or because I thought a huge, flashy multimillion-dollar Hollywood feature is the best way to explore and present such a complex story, but because of the frenzied attacks on the film by those interested in protecting the Warren Commission; by LBJ loyalists rising predictably to defend against any suggestion that LBJ was anything other than the gentle, perfect knight they wish he had been; by hard leftists, eager to attack the notion that a democratically elected president, under our system of government, could have accomplished good things that might have caused him to be killed by those outside the system (in their demonology, nothing produced by the American political system is worth defending and is therefore not worth murdering); and finally, by some sneering mainstream journalists, many of whom were directly involved in reporting the events of November 22, 1963, and in retirement had become self-appointed guardians of the “lone crazed gunman” theory.

In the early 1990s, new counterconspiracy theories were making the front page. Joe Califano, a close aide to LBJ throughout his presidency and later a member of Jimmy Carter’s cabinet, wrote in a publicly released letter to Louis Stokes, chair of the House Assassinations Committee, for example, “Johnson believed, as he said to me, that Fidel Castro was responsible for Kennedy’s assassination. In a reference to attempts by the Kennedy brothers to assassinate Castro, Johnson told me, ‘Kennedy tried to get Castro, but Castro got Kennedy first.’”